harpojaeger.com

Last night, I attended the third of our mandatory class meetings.  The first was on alcohol use, the second on issues of identity and bias, and this one was on sexual assault.  Oddly enough, I had actually been looking forward to it the most, because I thought that it would be the most applicable presentation.  The first two were certainly interesting (great speakers, excellent presentations), but this one went beyond.  The featured speaker was Katie Koestner, whose story and presentation were incredible.  I’ve never seen so many people so attentive.  I don’t think I heard a word spoken out loud throughout the entire thing.

But what I really want to write about is a discussion I had afterwards.  I approached some of the event coordinators who had told us how to get involved with some peer-education programs, to ask some questions, and got involved in a discussion with another guy about the ability to criticize the actions of a victim of such abuse.  The discussion lasted a while, but where it ended up was with the concept of a threshold of doubt; a point past which we have no reliable way of asserting how we would act in a situation.  I submit that rape is over such a threshold.  None of us can predict how we would act given such an intensely demoralizing and disempowering event.

That being said, the guy I was discussing with made the very good point that if we always hold off on judgment based on a lack of certainty, we never reach any conclusions, because nothing is certain.  It’s when we make assertions without declaring or implying the proper level of uncertainty that problems happen.

The result of the conversation was the dismissal of several assumptions.  When I first heard this guy speak, I assumed him to be an angry, misinformed, and subtly sexist person who denied the role that society and masculinity play in a culture of sexual abuse.  By the end of the conversation I had realized that I was completely wrong.  This was a thoughtful person who personally knew several rape victims, and was extremely dedicated to moral and practical consistency on opinions and debates relating to this topic.

And I will venture to say that I had taught him something.  At the end, we agreed that it was important to understand the context in which one criticizes the actions of a victim of something like rape.  I had spuriously accused him of doing more damage than good by bringing it up.  He made the very good point that none of the three of us (another person was also involved in the conversation) were in a position, had a desire, or were likely to spread dangerous misinformation.  So, with this in mind, I amended my statement, and said that I wanted to make sure he understood the ways in which one must modify such speech in a public forum.  This he agreed with.

So we both left the conversation with a heightened respect for the other (he had initially accused me of getting “violent” when I raised my voice following his assertion that beating up a sexual aggressor would help solve the problem), and an increased awareness of how difficult it is to engage in meaningful debate about these issues.

This is the kind of discussion we need more of.  Not to sound self-centered, but I think we exemplified the way people should be talking about these things.  Especially because both of us had spoken to Katie after the presentation and conveyed our gratitude and interest.

Make no mistake, these issues are incredibly hard to discuss.  Emotionally, logically, and morally.  But we owe it to the past and future victims to try.

I’ve been at Brown now since yesterday morning.  I’ve met SO many interesting people, and there are so many more to meet.  One of the biggest transitions has definitely been class size.  PVPA, all six grades, is less than a quarter the size of just the incoming freshman class here.  It’s SO BIG!  I’m coming to terms with the fact that I will not know everyone.  But I am making some good friends.

People are really friendly.  Especially when you remember that they’re all in the same boat as you; they’re nervous about meeting people as well.  If I suspend my judgment long enough to meet someone, I usually find them to be interesting and really engaging.  So it’s been a really rewarding experience so far.

Orientation programming continues essentially through Tuesday, when our first academic meetings with advisors occur.  I also have two job interviews on Tuesday and another on Thursday, all for on-campus jobs.  They are all really interesting positions, so I will be figuring that out pretty soon.

Things are coming together.  There’s certainly a lot to keep track of, but I feel pretty on top of it, especially with the help of the advisors and orientation committee, who’ve been awesome.

So far, a big thumbs up.  College is pretty fun.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this site’s transition to WordPress, and, thus, the one-year anniversary of my beginning to blog in earnest.  This is a good opportunity to reflect on some stuff I’ve learned and look to the future of this site and my interests.

I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with this blog.  I began by using it as sort of a journal of my actions and thoughts.  Coupled with the WordPress client for iPhone, I did a fair amount of spontaneous and short blogging, expressing ideas I had, things I saw, and so forth.  As school began, I started becoming more introverted, focusing on the way I felt (usually being under a lot of stress, as it was senior year).  In January, my iPhone was stolen, and I lost the ability to blog at anytime.  I started blogging almost compulsively when I got home every day, almost as a way to let out my feelings.  Because of everything that was going on at school, it felt good to have a place to write about what I thought it all mean.  Sometimes it’s hard to articulate that sort of stuff when you’re still in it.  You need to take a step back.  Blogging has definitely helped me do that, in other areas of my life as well.

When I got a new iPhone in early July, I started using Twitter for uses other than just tracking this blog, and shortly thereafter joined Facebook.  Now I use those as two methods of communication (they’re closely integrated), and have begun to regard this blog as more of a place for contemplative, well though-out concepts or arguments.  A lot of my writing has been inspired by the increasing amount of other blogs I’ve been reading, including Paul Krugman‘s The Conscience of a Liberal, Jewschool, CAP, and Climate Progress, to name a few.  In a lot of cases, doing this writing has helped me solidify my own thoughts on subjects, and opened my mind to new points of view.

In the future, I want to blog more regularly than I have been recently; at least a couple times a week.  Interestingly, it was easier for me to blog regularly during the school year than it has been now.  I’m planning to blog a couple times next week from the NHC Summer Institute about the program and some issues that I will be considering during my time there.  There’s a plan for facilitation of a dialogue about the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although I don’t really like calling it that), so I’m expecting to get some interesting stuff out of that.

As I begin school, I will almost definitely be undergoing some serious life changes in terms of how I spend my time and what I work on.  I intend to keep this blog an important component of my work and thoughts, and I hope to attract a wider audience as I meet new people and discover new ideas.

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year in many ways.  I look forward to many more.

The saga of my purchasing of the new iPhone 3G S began yesterday, when my mom asked why I hadn’t camped out for the new iPhone.  I explained to her the upgrade eligibility requirements, which resulted in my being unable to buy an iPhone at the unsubsidized price until December 12th.  She tried to find a way around it, and we spent a while on the phone, somewhat unsuccessfully.  The result was that I went to the Apple Store in Holyoke today to try to badger them into giving me a phone for the cheap price.  They couldn’t for any of the reasons we had thought of, but it turned out my father’s line (on the family plan) was eligible for an upgrade, so we bought the phone through that line, and then went to the AT&T store and had them switch it.  This took two full trips back and forth, but it got done, and the result is that I have the new iPhone, which is awesome.  I’m still working on a case for it, but the new features seem to be pretty great.

This evening I was in Natick seeing Cadence with two other members of 5-Alone.  The show was excellent.  They did a lot more jazz standard and barbershop type stuff than I was expecting.  It was all good, but some of it felt a little recursive after a while.  Except for the Cole Porter.  Cole Porter is really the best.  You just can’t beat him in terms of standards.  Fabulous.

It has been an extremely successful day.

A lot has happened recently.  I’ve been involved in some very complicated issues at my school.  It looks as though they are progressing favourably.  I’ve also gotten a Facebook.  I had been resisting this, but I think it had to happen.  I suppose it will make my life easier and all, but I’m still skeptical.

Lacking the motivating force of school as a timekeeper is making it difficult for me to coalesce my thoughts into an actual blog post.  I still have plenty to write about, but it’s less natural to write about it.  I think this will be responsible in part for some shifts in the way I approach this site in the coming months.

That being said, I do have some pretty interesting stuff to write about.  Today me and my friend presented our honors project to the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class back at high school (remember that place?).  It was cool to be back there – for the first time since graduation.  I felt out-of-place already.  I’ve moved on, and new people have taken my place.  And that’s as it should be.  People shouldn’t waste their time and effort hanging on to lingering memories.  I want to be remembered, but I don’t want to be canonized (not that I expect to be) or overly retained.  So I sort of felt as though I was injecting myself back into the lives and routines of people who I should be leaving alone.  But it was nice to see them, and people were happy to see me, so I felt okay about it.  Also, the presentation went really well.  Originally, it was going to consist of a lecture by the two of us, and a simulation we designed to demonstrate some of the economic principles we dealt with in the project.  However, we ended up doing the project later than we had expected, and we only had about an hour for the whole thing.  So, last night we designed an extremely stripped-down version of the simulation with the intent of demonstrating Gresham’s Law, a simple but extremely important principle.  The simulation worked PERFECTLY.  We hadn’t had time to test it out on our own by playing it a couple times, but it went exactly as we had hoped.  We created a small system for buying and selling commodities (corn and iron [represented by corn kernels (intended for burning for ethanol) and steel hex nuts]) and a system for switching between gold and silver bullion (raw metal).  The commodities could be bought and sold in either gold or silver, creating a ratio between the two (simulating the effect a government-regulated currency would have), but the bullion exchange forum (representing goldsmiths, a historically accurate and important figure), operated on its own terms (historically speaking, according to the amounts of bullion available).  This creates an imbalance, and allows people to make a profit by exchanging currencies.  By manipulating the prices of the commodities and the bullion ratio available at the goldsmith station, we were able to force one currency entirely out of circulation.  We did this both ways; we first started with silver being hoarded and gold spent, and within the span of about two turns, we turned it around entirely.  We also employed paper currency for silver at the commodity stations, adding a twist, as it could be used to buy and sell, but not to exchange for bullion.  Also historically accurately, the winner had an extremely wide margin, almost three times the amount of money as the loser.  Our simulation elegantly proved Gresham’s Law, and also sort of proved capitalism too; that the more money you have the more you can make.  So that was a great success.

Also speaking of money, now that I have a debit card, Mint.com, which I was already using, has become vastly more useful.  I am starting to be able to track how much money I spend on what, and set budgets.  Within the next few months, I think I’ll gain a lot of insight into where my money goes, and how to spend it more effectively.  I also figured out that you can add your PayPal account to Mint, which is nifty.

I have been submerging myself in resources on investing.  Right now, I’m leaning towards ShareBuilder for a brokerage, because of their low fees.  Since I’m doing long-term investing, it doesn’t matter that they’re executing trades only once a week at maximum.  However, I’ve realized that I should research direct investing before committing to a brokerage account.  If I can do that effectively, I can avoid a lot of fees.  I would then have to keep track of my own investments, but with the help of Google Finance that shouldn’t be too hard.  I hope to have a substantial amount of money invested and in my planned Roth IRA within a few weeks.

I’ve decided not to try and write about all the things I’ve been doing since I last wrote.  There are too many, and I think it would become to much of just a laundry list.  Instead, I have some stuff to say about what I’m up to now.  I have graduated, and am done with school.  Tomorrow, however, I’ll be back in my Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class, presenting my friend and me’s honors project.  We’re doing a simulation to demonstrate the creation of the gold standard, which was first instituted in England in 1816/1821, depending on how you look at it.  The next day, I’ll be back again working with the Holocaust Studies classes.  The one-act I wrote for them is going to be performed that day, and I’ll spend the first forty-five minutes of each hour-and-a-half-long class working on the play before it’s performed.  I am super excited for this; I think it’s going to be really fun and interesting.

I am SO behind on the Sonnet of the Week.  I need to write two every week for FIVE weeks.

Current events things I am thinking about and may write about soon: Sonia Sotomayor, Dick Cheney, the Northampton bike trails projects, environmentalism (as always), and food ethics.

It’s been over a week since I wrote, an uncharacteristically long time.  I’m not going to attempt to write about all the things that have happened since then right now, because I’m still in the middle of tons of stuff.  Graduation is tomorrow, and I am overloaded with stuff to do.  Sometime in the next few days I hope to write about what I’ve been doing, as well as some pretty important political and current events topics that have gone down recently.  Also, I’m pretty behind on the Sonnet of the Week (five weeks delinquent after this week).  A couple weeks ago, as the end of school started to really come close, I decided I’d have to wait until after graduation to get back to the sonneteering.

This summer, I am planning to start blogging about current events much more regularly.  I am going to have to do some serious thinking about what I want this blog to be like next year.

That’s all for now.  More to follow.

In the grand scheme of things, my family is pretty wealthy.  We a own a house, and rent one floor out, my parents both have jobs, I am going to an expensive college, we have two cars, we eat well, we travel, etc.  Compared even to some people in this immediate area, we are very wealthy.

Today I went to a friend’s graduation at NMH.  Compared to the people there, I felt poor.  There were exceptions, of course, but the vast majority of people there were incredibly wealth.  They were underdressed in the way rich people are.  And you could just tell from the way they conducted themselves.  It gives you a chance to see how the other one-thousandth of a percent live, if you will.

It’s weird.  Right now, the gap between the rich and poor in our nation is the biggest it’s ever been.  It’s like the Gilded Age, or the Roaring Twenties.  But I think that the societal shifts that are being brought about by the economic situation are going to change that.  It really seems to me that the whole culture of American consumerism is changing.  That wealth gap is going to start getting smaller as our education system improves, as urban infrastructure starts to improve, as clean energy begins to redistribute the population.

But for the moment, it’s still startling to consider how poor I am compared to some others.  I’m not feeling sorry for myself; I’m acutely aware of how privileged I am, and I’m fortunate to have the opportunities I do.  But I do think about people less fortunate than myself, and never less than when I’m staring the upper class elite right in the face.

Prom was last night.  I had a fabulous time.  I have decided that whatever lies in my future, I want it to involve the regular donning of tails.  They are pretty awesome.

In somewhat less personal and more important news, the Waxman-Markey bill is generating quite a splash in the House.  The New York Times‘ blog Green Inc. has an excellent post detailing some of the reactions to the bill.  I’m worried by its claim that the bill is going to meet opposition from the House Agriculture Committee.  Special interests in Congress need to realize that they are going to be negatively affected by the effects of global warming no matter what.  We’re talking about epic shifts in societal organization, from top to bottom.  Geographically, the earth is going to change, and humans will be forced to deal with the effects of those changes.  Whether or not we’re ready is what will, I believe, ultimately determine the long-term ability of our species to survive and prosper.

Pushing against serious and meaningful measures to counteract and deal with global warming is right now one of the least constructive things anyone can do.  Once the public really comes to realize that, politicians are going to have to shape up.  When a politician drags their feet on an issue that their constituents recognize as serious, they don’t last.